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Yesterday I spent the day in a pretty heady, day-long workshop sponsored by the Institute for the Future out here in Palo Alto talking about what schools, and specifically teaching might look like at some point down the road. It was titled “The Future of Learning Agents” and Steve Hargadon was there too, sitting in as the unofficial, official blogger of the event. I tried to add some value to a great conversation that included folks like Howard Rheingold from Stanford (and author of Smart Mobs), Tom Carroll, the president of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (NCTAF), and Mark Morrison, the Director of Leadership Development for the New Technology Foundation among about a dozen others.

Bottom line? As one of the participants said, “There are 1,300 teacher preparation programs that are preparing teachers for schools that none of us think should exist.” It was pretty edgy.

At one point we were put into small groups and asked to come up with a job description and an ideal candidate for a “learning agent” 10 years down the road. The result was pretty interesting. None of the job descriptions were for traditional teachers. Few of the candidates’ qualifications emphasized schooling or even classroom experience. Instead, the group identified candidates that had a wide variety of life experiences and attributes, most centered on the ability to facilitate or connect, and an understanding of social technologies and deep collaboration. And my take away was that we’re looking at a future where there will be many different opportunities for working with kids and communities in a teaching role other than the traditional idea of what a teacher is.

How long it’s going to take for that future to arrive is another question altogether, however. I think there was consensus in the room that it could take a very long time. But where we lacked consensus was where the pressure points for real change are. Some said it has to happen on a national level (myself included.) Others said that change in education might actually be driven by the faltering health care system or environmental pressures. It was a wide-ranging discussion that really left my head spinning.

How do we go about getting our “decision making few” involved in these conversations. It would be nice to have all district administrators attend one of these workshops. It sounds like they could learn a few things from attending.

I love the interactive graphic you linked to but like most of these things it gives no sense of priorities. My sense is that the gateway skill to this new world is navigation/filtering/goal seeking (is there a word for this yet?). Until teachers themselves can model these skills students will have to discover them on their own or be left to drift in a sea of what appears to be nonsense.

Has anyone asked the question, “Should the future exist as we predict it?” And, “Should we be more cautious in how we contribute to the shaping of the future and the speed at which it is realized?” The quotation, “There are 1,300 teacher preparation programs that are preparing teachers for schools that none of us think should exist.” is pretty scary to me. They are products of those very schools. I understand “in spirit” what this means, but to imply that our schools as they stand now are totally dysfunctional is irresponsible. There are very real problems in schooling (and society) that are not going to be alleviated by new technologies, web 2.0 and the total redesign of schooling.

I am as much a proponent of innovation in learning as anyone, but many of the reform issues we have been talking about over the years are not new. Dewey, Vygotsky, Bruner (“facilitate, connect, collaborate”, life experiences grounded in authentic contexts…), and many others’ dreams of schooling remain unrealized… in spite of technology. Sure, small pockets of ‘reform’ have happened, but we still face the same battles. I just think we need to balance such discussions a little more when talking with today’s ‘futurists’. These old relics’ views of the future of schooling is still worth striving for, I think. Hopefully, they think so, too. These rich authentic and highly social contexts today would look different than in Dewey or Vygotsky’s time, but the principles remain the same.

A shared mind map like this one, as I understand it, is a gathering of knowledge: a visual representation of the way a group of people think together.

It is not meant to be a list of priorities. The action of creating a mindmap creates a certain synergy that can be a catalyst for change, but doesn’t outline the change process itself.

When we are thinking about mapping a future we are talking about a dream and I think it is outrageously important to dream with abandon.

The next step is to outline the steps we can take to get there, and I have no doubt that we will stand on the shoulders of giants (Dewey, Vygotsky, Bruner) in order to do so. But without the dream, I’d almost go so far as to say: why bother?

phew **wipes forehead** got a little worked up there. But then again I tend to do that about things I really care about

[...] But heck, why not let it all come out at once, and what in particular has pushed me over the edge is this Future of Teaching nonsense. Nothing to do with Will (who, notably, doesn’t exactly endorse the ‘findings’!) or the fact that nobody invited me (sniff , just to do with this kinda stuff: At one point we were put into small groups and asked to come up with a job description and an ideal candidate for a “learning agent” 10 years down the road. The result was pretty interesting. None of the job descriptions were for traditional teachers. Few of the candidates’ qualifications emphasized schooling or even classroom experience. Instead, the group identified candidates that had a wide variety of life experiences and attributes, most centered on the ability to facilitate or connect, and an understanding of social technologies and deep collaboration. [Weblogg-ed] [...]

[...] It seems that the KnowledgeWorks Foundation and the Institute for the Future have been working hard at trying to sort out possible futures for teaching. Will Richardson’s Weblogg-ed carries a brief report of their recent workshop “The Future of Learning Agents”. The title of this workshop immediately alerts us to the presuppositions made by the organisers. “Learning Agents” are probably not teachers… [...]

lol – no, wasn’t there, but this is the kind of thing that turns my crank. It’s what I base my work on.

I find that the only way real to trigger change is to get the people involved in a room having meaningful conversations around what is important to them and to create an artifact that represents their conversation (like the mindmap).

I say trigger, because I can’t make change happen on my own. I can only trigger it to happen by creating certain conditions where people will be able to pinpoint the passion around what it is they do and why.

[...] James Farmer over at incsub got his knickers in a knot over the posting by Will Richardson regarding the Future of Teaching. I’m not sure if it’s a disagreement with the content or a defensive reaction to the positions but in either case he’s gotten me fired up now as well. (all due and sincere respect to James and Will. I wouldn’t spend time responding if I didnt’ think you were worth hearing. Which leads me to…) “Interestingly enough I’ve belonged to three broad professions so far, teaching, journalism and web-design/dev… all of which no end of the unqualified and unexperienced won’t hesitate to have an opinion on. Just because you’ve been taught, doesn’t mean you can teach… because you read newspapers doesn’t mean you can pick up a pen (or a blog!) and become a journalist and because you spend every day on the web, that you can design successful environments and experiences. I’ve learned the hard way.” [...]

@ Tracy – Dream away! It certainly is important. All I am saying is that we are still struggling to realize (“how to get there”) the dreams of the “giants” and we should recognize this more in such discussions, as we are still talking about the very same visions for schooling and learning. They championed wholeheartedly that teachers need to be more like learning agents, and I bet that they would be really excited about some of the new technologies available today

Phew – didn’t mean to make the priorities comment a criticism of Will’s post – just that it is a next step to moving forward with something like this. Put this in the hands of most people and the logical question is “where do I start? What do I do differently tomorrow morning?” As noted my personal take is that folks should start with whole arena of navigation/filtering skills which those of us past a certain age don’t come by naturally because we grew up in an age of – relative – information scarcity. I’ll bet that others have other ideas and that is what I’d like to see.

I do feel that focusing on a positive future and seeing how to get there is ultimately a better use of my time than attributing the roots of the ideas to points and people in history.

I agree that we are championing the same thing in theory as any socio-constructivist from the past. Yet our ‘socio’ is so different, our tools and technologies are so different, and our students are different as well. The playing field is rapidly changing.

Someone could give me a theory, written by someone else I have never met or had a conversation with, and say – here. This is the answer. Let’s do this and education will be perfect. I could even go on and study that theory and agree, wow. This is beautiful. But until I have serious conversations with people who care as deeply as I do about education and until I can dream with them about our own future and flesh out the theoretical structure with our own relevant meat, the theories will not have all that much real meaning for me.

What Will and the others at that conference did was live those theories. They were learning in social interaction.

I can’t think of better recognition.

I am enjoying this conversation. I sit on the edge of my seat as I type – thanks!

I am fascinated by web 2.0 as it impacts education. In 2004 I got my Ph.D. with a thesis on how I moved from being a technophobe to being a technophile. I’ve used the web in my teaching for over 10 years, but I can’t interest any local education institutions in a course on using web 2.0 in teaching. I think all the undergrad teachers should be getting as much training in this as possible, but it doesn’t seem to be on their radar at all.

@Tracy – I think we are finally finding a common ground in our negotiations. What you write is really at the root of what I was trying (maybe not all that well, though) to get at. Educational leaders, innovators and teachers have been having the same conversations for decades, yet we still struggle with the “how do we get there” part. The targets are the same, I think… only the tools and frameworks, or as you put it, “playing fields” change. Serious and passionate conversations and dreams are essential in this process – no doubt. Theory always needs to be grounded, negotiated and fleshed out in practical ways. I guess I am continually amazed at speed (slow!) at which we are able to “get there”. It’s my hope that increased options and opportunities for communication and collaboration by all, such as that which Will participated in, will speed up the rate at which we “get there”. Great discussion!

Cheers from a McGill Education Alumnus! See… the ripples are expanding

In the last Executive Edge newsletter we told you about a $150,000 three-year research project to study a change management trend called appreciative inquiry. It’s a new process that works to change the way people think – to get them thinking collectively about how they want their organization to operate.

Gervase Bushe, SFU Business associate professor of management and organizational change, who is consulting and studying the process and its outcomes at the Vancouver School Board, reported on the results of the first year of study. “Preliminary indications are that the change process has been so successful that the BC Schools Superintendents’ Association is offering appreciative inquiry training and is also planning an appreciative inquiry summit for Kelowna in August,” says Bushe. What’s more, he says, numerous BC School Districts are planning to use appreciative inquiry in their schools next year.

It’s a powerful change process, based in the very foundations that have been brought up in this thread.

If we were to design an appreciative change process for our school systems I think we could find out way to get there…together.

[...] That sentiment connected to something we talked about at the Institute for the Future workshop I wrote about earlier that, not surprisingly, raised some hackles in some parts. The discussion centered on the “Map of Future Forces Affecting Education” that they created with the KnowledgeWorks Foundation. One part of that map talks about how we will be “rescripting life,” how “the standard narratives of adolescence, early adulthood, and post-retirement get rewritten.” And I think we’re seeing the early stages of that right now in a lot of different, complex ways, most clearly perhaps in the post-retirement story. (What is “retirement” anyway?) [...]

[...] Will Richardson’s blog today talked about a workshop that he attended. One of the pieces that he took away from it is that we are training teachers for classrooms that won’t (or shouldn’t) exist in 10 years. [...]

[...] Will Richardson’s recent posts about the future of schools and teachers leaves me an opening for a new “big idea” that I’ve been working on lately. I finished reading Complexity and Education, by Davis and Sumara, which has me thinking about complex systems and the classroom. Complexity theory is relatively new to me, although it’s been around for several years. I’ve read about it, but never anything that was connected directly to the classroom. It’s hard to write about something that I know so little about, but in the spirit of trying to make sense, I plunge into the muddle. [...]

This sounds like a fascinating workshop. I believe that we as educators have not only a right but a responsibility to attempt to predict the future; however, I also believe we need to remain cognizant of the difficult, if not futile, nature of this endeavor. We simply do not know, in the context of such a highly complex system as that of the educational landscape, where we are heading, at least not in any definitive sense. I agree with Steve that the notion “There are 1,300 teacher preparation programs that are preparing teachers for schools that none of us think should exist” seems to unfairly negate all that is currently right in the world of education. Yes, we must constantly strive to move forward and look towards an improved future. Yet, we must heed the lessons of the past and build upon that which we have worked so hard to accomplish.

The furture of teaching should include a market model. Let students and teachers find each other online or live. With Web 2.0 technology like http://www.wiziq.com the power starts to transfer to the hands of those who actually do the teaching and actually do the leaarning and the institutions over time will have less and less power.